Word: antonioni
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...unlike the other characters in Blow-Up, the photographer is not among the living dead in Antonioni's sterile London. Antonioni's photographer is in limbo, precariously balanced on the borderline between submergence in the frenzied non-involvement around him, and commitment to reality. Essentially weak, he inevitably succumbs to the daily temptations of his life and profession. For example, in the middle of examining the most important pictures he has ever taken, he allows himself to take part in a mini-orgy with two teen-age would-be models; on his way to the scene of the crime...
...photographer is better than the people Antonioni chooses to show beside him, redeemed in part by his instinctive commitment, however minimal, to photography. Rejecting the current connotations of "photographer." Antonioni defines the term as one who lives (and matures) by watching. The photographer in Blow-Up can no more join the mods and lose himself in their sterile pleasures than join the Establishment and condemn them. His camera saves him by the skin of his teeth, and at the end of the film, Antonioni leaves him on an affirmative note...
...ending is consistent with the rest of Antonioni's work. In L'Avventura, Sandro and Claudia's romance fails to solve their individual problems, yet they will remain together; in La Notte, Giovanni and Lidia decide not to separate although they know their marriage will never be successful; Red Desert ends with Giuliana's realization that she must not commit suicide even if her life is filled with neurotic unhappiness. Unlike the films of Rosselini, Hitchcock, and Renoir, which follow characters in a state of emotional or spiritual crisis through a therapeutic chain of events, Antonioni's films are rarely...
...examining the nature of photography, Antonioni carefully injects another theme, the more basic conflict between illusion and reality. The first scene of Blow-Up introduces the photographer as he leaves a flop-house where he spent the night; we learn that he had gone to photograph the sick old men who sleep there. This personal preference for social realism over fashion proves the photographer dedicated. But in photographing the tragedy and problems of other people, the photographer in Blow-Up substitutes this for an understanding and eventual solution of his own problems. The reality of the photographs becomes the photographer...
Like Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, Antonioni feels that violence is an integral part of contemporary society and cannot be ignored. His photographer, like Hitchcock's, is brought back to reality by means of melodrama: waiting for the owner of a junk shop he wants to buy, the photographer wanders through a nearby park. Ignoring a bizarre fat lady that 99 out of 100 photographers would have snapped without thinking twice, he photographs pigeons instead, then two lovers kissing. The girl sees him and pleads with him to give her the roll of film. Unsuccessful, she follows him to his studio...